David Obura

CORDIO East Africa

Summary for policymakers of the thematic assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health (nexus assessment) of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 16 December 2024 The thematic assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health (nexus assessment) of...

Atlantic reef-building corals and coral reefs continue to experience extensive decline due to increased stressors related to climate change, disease, pollution, and numerous anthropogenic threats. To understand the impact of ocean warming and reef loss on the estimated extinction risk of shallow water Atlantic reef-building scleractinians and mille...

Countries have committed to conserving and restoring ecosystems after signing the Kunming‐Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) will serve as a headline indicator to track countries' progress toward achieving this goal. Using Kenyan coral reefs, we demonstrate how nations implementing the GBF can use st...

This review of recent advances in biosphere research aims to provide information on selected issues related to changes in biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, social and economic interactions with ecosystems, and the impacts of climate change on the biosphere. We highlight advances on nine themes that have been recently published in peer-reviewed j...

Community-based conservation has been increasingly recognized as critical to achieve both conservation and socio-economic development goals worldwide. However, the long-term sustainability of community-based conservation programs is dependent on a broadly shared perception among community members that management actions are achieving their stated g...

Radical and quick transformations towards sustainability will be fundamental to achieving a more sustainable future. However, deliberate interventions to reconfigure systems will result in winners and losers, with the potential for greater or lesser equity and justice outcomes. Positive tipping points (PTPs) have been proposed as interventions in c...

Protected and conserved areas (PCAs) are key ecosystem management tools for conserving biodiversity and sustaining ecosystem services and social cobenefits. As countries adopt a 30% target for protection of land and sea under the Global Biodiversity Framework of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, a critical question emerging is,...

The persistence of diverse yet threatened ecosystems like coral reefs will require urgent action underpinned by effective assessments of resilience. Resilience potential assessments are commonly used to identify coral reefs likely to be more resilient to disturbances, based on indicators of state and function. Assessments are intended to support de...

Countries have committed to conserving and restoring ecosystems after signing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) will serve as a headline indicator to track progress of countries towards achieving this goal, and to guide action across the GBF’s targets. Using Kenyan coral reefs, we demons...

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity set the agenda for global aspirations and action to reverse biodiversity loss. The GBF includes an explicit goal for maintaining and restoring biodiversity, encompassing ecosystems, species and genetic diversity (goal A), targets for ecosystem prot...

Climate tipping elements are large-scale subsystems of the Earth that may transgress critical thresholds (tipping points) under ongoing global warming, with substantial impacts on the biosphere and human societies. Frequently studied examples of such tipping elements include the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (...

Operating within safe and just Earth system boundaries requires mobilizing key actors across scale to set targets and take actions accordingly. Robust, transparent and fair cross-scale translation methods are essential to help navigate through the multiple steps of scientifc and normative judgements in translation, with clear awareness of associate...

Non-technical summary We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide r...

Safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for surface water and groundwater (blue water) have been defined for sustainable water management in the Anthropocene. Here we assessed whether minimum human needs could be met with surface water from within individual river basins alone and, where this is not possible, quantified how much groundwater wo...

The rate and extent of global biodiversity change is surpassing our ability to measure, monitor and forecast trends. We propose an interconnected worldwide system of observation networks — a global biodiversity observing system (GBiOS) — to coordinate monitoring worldwide and inform action to reach international biodiversity targets.

Climate tipping elements are large-scale subsystems of the Earth that may transgress critical thresholds (tipping points) under ongoing global warming, with substantial impacts on biosphere and human societies. Frequently studied examples of such tipping elements include the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, perm...

Data on coral reef health prior to large-scale disturbances are unavailable in most parts of the world including the Western Indian Ocean (WIO). Robust coral reef health baselines could improve the understanding of changes occurring to reefs in the 21st century and prevent the “shifting baseline” phenomenon, enabling researchers and managers to eva...

Radical and quick transformations towards sustainability have winners and losers, with equity and justice embedded to a greater or a lesser extent. According to research, only the wealthiest 1–4 % of the global population will radically need to change their consumption, behaviours, societal values and beliefs in order to make space for an equitable...

The stability and resilience of the Earth system and human well-being are inseparably linked1–3, yet their interdependencies are generally under-recognized; consequently, they are often treated independently4,5. Here, we use modelling and literature assessment to quantify safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for climate, the biosphere, wate...

Safe and just Earth System Boundaries (ESBs) for surface and groundwater (blue water) have been defined for sustainable water management in the Anthropocene. We evaluate where minimum human needs can be met within the surface water ESB and, where this is not possible, identify how much groundwater is required. 2.6 billion people live in catchments...

Earth’s biodiversity and human societies face pollution, overconsumption of natural resources,urbanization, demographic shifts, social and economic inequalities, and habitat loss, many of whichare exacerbated by climate change. Here, we review links among climate, biodiversity, and society anddevelop a roadmap toward sustainability. These includeli...

Since 1970, there has been an overall decline in wildlife populations in the order of 52%. Freshwater species populations have declined by 76%; species populations in Central and South America have declined by 83%; and in the Indo-Pacific by 67%. These are often not complete extinctions, but large declines in the numbers of animals in each species,...

In late 2021, a range of experts from around the world were approached to provide expert input to the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)–the new strategic framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that will guide interventions to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services for the next three decades. In this opinion...

Living within planetary limits requires attention to justice as biophysical boundaries are not inherently just. Through collaboration between natural and social scientists, the Earth Commission defines and operationalizes Earth system justice to ensure that boundaries reduce harm, increase well-being, and reflect substantive and procedural justice....

Over the last two decades, coral reefs have experienced dire declines due to intensifying anthropogenic disturbances and climate change. Defining and quantifying coral reef resilience now represents a critical management objective, but there is still little consensus on the approach and the indices to be used. In this study, we develop a multi-fact...

This scoping study sets the parameters for a more elaborate anthropological account of sustainable development goals in the Kenyan Coast -SDG Community Narratives

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4423197&download=yes

Despite decades of increasing investment in conservation, we have not succeeded in ''bending the curve'' of biodiversity decline. Efforts to meet new targets and goals for the next three decades risk repeating this outcome due to three factors: neglect of increasing drivers of decline; unrealistic expectations and time frames of biodiversity recove...

Protected and Conserved Areas (PCAs) are key ecosystem management tools for conserving biodiversity and sustaining ecosystem services and social co-benefits. As countries converge on a 30% target for protection of land and sea under the post-2020 framework of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, a critical question emerging is, “w...

We review the current knowledge of the biodiversity of the ocean as well as the levels of decline and threat for species and habitats. The lack of understanding of the distribution of life in the ocean is identified as a significant barrier to restoring its biodiversity and health. We explore why the science of taxonomy has failed to deliver knowle...

Despite substantial progress in understanding global biodiversity loss, major taxonomic and geographic knowledge gaps remain. Decision makers often rely on expert judgement to fill knowledge gaps, but are rarely able to engage with sufficiently large and diverse groups of specialists. To improve understanding of the perspectives of thousands of bio...

The biodiversity of marine and coastal habitats is experiencing unprecedented change. While there are well-known drivers of these changes, such as overexploitation, climate change and pollution, there are also relatively unknown emerging issues that are poorly understood or recognized that have potentially positive or negative impacts on marine and...

Defining a safe and just space for the biosphere requires global-scale synthetic measures of functional integrity in relation to Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP). We estimated, based on a systematic review of the literature, the minimum level of functional integrity needed to secure multiple critical ecosystem services, including pollination,...

Governments are negotiating actions intended to halt biodiversity loss and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. Here, we show that bending the curve for biodiversity is possible, but only if actions are implemented urgently and in an integrated manner. Connecting these actions to biodiversity outcomes and tracking progress remain a challenge.

Environmental assessments increasingly call for just transformations, yet do not offer concrete visions of what these might be. This paper conceptualizes and operationalizes Earth system justice (ESJ) through articulating just ends which minimize significant harm to humans from Earth system change while ensuring access to needed resources for all a...

Ocean warming is increasing the incidence, scale, and severity of global-scale coral bleaching and mortality, culminating in the third global coral bleaching event that occurred during record marine heatwaves of 2014-2017. While local effects of these events have been widely reported, the global implications remain unknown. Analysis of 15,066 reef...

Human impacts on the Earth’s biosphere are driving the global biodiversity crisis. Governments are preparing to agree on a set of actions intended to halt the loss of biodiversity and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. We provide evidence that the proposed actions can bend the curve for biodiversity, but only if these actions are implemented urg...

EXPERT INPUT TO THE POST-2020 GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY FRAMEWORK: TRANSFORMATIVE ACTIONS ON ALL DRIVERS OF BIODIVERSITY LOSS ARE URGENTLY REQUIRED TO ACHIEVE THE GLOBAL GOALS BY 2050

Ecosystems worldwide are under increasing threat. We applied a standardized method for assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems, to coral reefs in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO), covering 11,919 km² of reef (~5% of the global total). Our approach combined indicators o...

As human activity threatens to make the planet unsafe for humanity and other life forms, scholars are identifying planetary targets set at a safe distance from biophysical thresholds beyond which critical Earth systems may collapse. Yet despite the profound implications that both meeting and transgressing such targets may have for human wellbeing,...

Programs and initiatives aiming to protect biodiversity and ecosystems have increased over the last decades in response to their decline. Most of these are based on monitoring data to quantitatively describe trends in biodiversity and ecosystems. The estimation of such trends, at large scales, requires the integration of numerous data from multiple...

Maintaining healthy, productive ecosystems in the face of pervasive and accelerating human impacts including climate change requires globally coordinated and sustained observations of marine biodiversity. Global coordination is predicated on an understanding of the scope and capacity of existing monitoring programs, and the extent to which they use...

Key Massage 1. Extreme events (droughts, floods, cyclones, marine heat waves) impacting Africa are linked to natural modes of variability in the ocean and amplified by climate change. 2. The Indian Ocean is warming faster than global oceans and will continue to warm even after emissions reach NetZero, having severe consequences on the African conti...

The Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region comprises almost 6% (about 15,180 km2) of the total global area of coral reefs, and the region is a globally important hotspot for coral reef biodiversity. The WIO includes sovereign states along the eastern and southern African mainland (Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa), island states (Mauri...

Plain Language Summary Mass bleaching events caused by warming oceans and intensifying marine heatwaves have killed millions of corals globally. In the central equatorial Pacific, coral reefs experienced three extreme heatwaves within 15 years, providing valuable insights into the mechanisms that could facilitate coral survival under global warming...

Despite substantial conservation efforts, the loss of ecosystems continues globally, along with related declines in species and nature’s contributions to people. An effective ecosystem goal, supported by clear milestones, targets and indicators, is urgently needed for the post-2020 global biodiversity framework and beyond to support biodiversity co...

A shared Earth approach links biodiversity and people

Substantial efforts and investments are being made to increase the scale and improve the effectiveness of marine conservation globally. Though it is mandated by international law and central to conservation policy, less attention has been given to how to operationalize social equity in and through the pursuit of marine conservation. In this article...

this document is the work of a team assembled by the International Coral Reef Society (ICRS). The mission of ICRS is to promote the acquisition and dissemination of scientific knowledge to secure the future of coral reefs, including via relevant policy frameworks and decision-making processes. This document seeks to highlight the urgency of taking...

The Scientific Outcome was produced by participants in the first-ever IPCC-IPBES co-sponsored workshop which took place in December 2020. This workshop is placed in the context of recent international agreements including the Paris Agreement, the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and ongoing preparation for the post-2020 global biodiversi...